_“Sologub” is a pseudonym—the author’s real name is Feodor Kuzmich
Teternikov. He was born in 1863. He completed a scholastic course at
Petrograd. His first published story appeared in the periodical
“Severny Viestnik” in 1894, but it was not until about a dozen years
later that he came into his fame, which he has since then further
enhanced_.
_This is all the biographical knowledge we have of a living novelist
whose place in Russian literature is secure beyond all question; the
scantiness of our knowledge is all the more amazing when we consider
that the author is over fifty, and that his complete works are in their
twentieth volume_.
_These include almost every possible form of literary expression—the
fairy tale, the poem, the play, the essay, the novel, and the short
story. Sologub’s place as a poet is hardly less assured than his place
as a novelist_.
_How little importance Sologub attaches to personal_ réclame _may be
gathered from his answer to repeated requests for a nutshell
“autobiography” a type of document in vogue in Russia; Maxim Gorky’s
impressive model, I believe, is quite familiar to English readers_.
_“I cannot give you my autobiography,” Sologub wrote to the editor of a
literary almanac, “as I do not think that my personality can be of
sufficient interest to any one. And I haven’t the time to waste on such
unnecessary business as an autobiography.”_
_At the beginning of his Complete Works, however, there is a poem in
prose, a kind of spiritual autobiography in which he insists that all
life is a miracle, and that his own surely is also. “I simply and
calmly reveal my soul ... in the hope that the intimate part of me
shall become the universal.” After such an avowal the reader will know
where to look for the author’s personality_.
_In studying his work, one finds that he has both realism and fantasy.
But while he is sometimes wholly realistic, he is seldom wholly
fantastic. His fantasy has always its foundations in reality. His
realism is as grey as that of Chekhov, whose logical successor he has
been acclaimed by Russian criticism. But it is his prodigious fantasy
that makes the point of his departure from the Chekhovian formula. When
he combines the two qualities, the strange reconciliation thus effected
produces a result as original as it is rich in “the meaning of life.”
Sologub himself says somewhere_:
_“I take a piece of life, coarse and poor, and make of it a delightful
legend_.”
_This sentence establishes the distinction between the two writers.
Life for Chekhov may contain its delightful characters, life itself is
seldom a delightful legend_.
_Actually, Sologub sees life more greyly than Chekhov; perhaps it is
this sense of grief “too great to be borne” that compels him to grope
for an outlet, for some kind of relief. Already in his earliest novel
one of the characters gives utterance to the significant words_:
“_Once you prove that life has no meaning, life becomes impossible_.”
_This relief is to be found within oneself in the “inner life”; that is
in the imagination, “imagination the great consoler” as Renan has said.
Imagination is everything; it is, indeed, the invoker of all beauty;
and admiration of beauty is the one escape out of life. The author,
“with whatever words he can find, speaks of one thing. Patiently calls
towards the one thing....” Writing of the sadness of life, he envelops
this sadness in the beauty evoked by his imagination as in a flame, and
withers it up. One finds him rejoicing that there is a life other than
“this ordinary, coarse, tedious, sunlight life,” that there is a life
that is “nocturnal, prodigious, resembling a fairy tale.”_
_It may sound like a startling antinomy to say that at his happiest
Sologub is a compound of Chekhov and Poe. It could be put in another
way: if Poe were a Russian, he might have written as Sologub writes.
This is to say that the mystery with which Sologub endows his tales is
never there for its own sake, but as a most intense symbol of reality._
_Consider a story like “The Invoker of the Beast.” As a story of
reincarnation it is a masterpiece of mystery. The reader, anxious for a
good tale merely, may let the matter rest there. But can he? Can he
listen to Gurov, who, while living through, in his delirium, his
previous existence, is so insistent about the “invincibility of his
walls”—and yet remain unmoved to the deep meaning of Gurov’s cry? Are
not the seemingly imperishable walls, within which Gurov thought
himself secure from the Beast, a symbol of our own subtle insecurity?
Is not our own Beast—be it some unexpected latent circumstance, or some
unlooked-for yet inevitable consequence of a past action, on the part
of our ancestors or of ourselves—ready to pounce upon us and ravage our
hearts, after a long and relentless pursuit, from which in the end
there is no escape?_
_Again, to one who has read most of Sologub’s productions, the story of
the Beast is interesting, because it contains, as it were, a synthesis
of the author’s tendencies. Its separate motifs are repeated in
variation in many of his other stories. There is the boy Timarides,
whom the author loves. Why?_
_Because Timarides is a child, because he is beautiful, trustful, and
ready to do daring deeds. Timarides perhaps stands for the young
generation reproaching the old for its neglect, its forgetfulness of
its promises, its settling in a groove, its stripping itself of its
happiest illusions_.
_And throughout his work, Sologub reiterates his affection for children
and the childlike. When he loves or pities an older person, he endows
him with childlike attributes. He does this in the little story, “The
Hoop.” Does the old man seem absurd to us? If so, it is to be inferred
that the fault is with ourselves. We have grown too sophisticated_.
_Here, again, Chekhov and Sologub meet. Chekhov loves the unpractical
people, because they are usually more lovable personalities than the
successful, practical ones; Sologub loves the absurd, the childlike,
the quixotic, for the same reason_.
_Rather than have them grow up and therefore become unlovable, Sologub
makes some of his children die young. There is, for example, in one of
his stories, sweet Rayechka, who died in a fall, and upon whom the boy,
Mitya, recalling her, muses in this fashion: “Had Rayechka lived to
grow up, she might have become a housemaid like Darya, pomaded her
hair, and squinted her cunning eyes.”_
_In “The Old House” it is the children once more who are the
revolutionaries—trustful, adorable, and daring. In “The White Mother”
the bachelor, Saksaoolov, is redeemed through the boy, Lesha, who
resembles his dead sweetheart_.
_Schoolmasters and schoolchildren are among the characters who frequent
the pages of Sologub’s books. Sologub, it should be remembered, began
life as a schoolmaster. The story “Light and Shadows” is, perhaps, a
reflection upon our educational system which crams the young mind with
a multitude of useless facts and starves the imagination; we see the
reaction of the system on the delicate organism of a sensitive and
imaginative child_.
_Mothers share the author’s affection for their children; but, like
schoolmasters, mothers, unfortunately, are of two kinds. The world has
its “black mammas” as well as its “white mammas.”_
_There are few writers who are so subtle, so insinuating, and so
seductive, in their power to make the reader think; few writers who
give so great a stimulus to the imagination_.
_With Chekhov, Russian fiction turns definitely to town life for its
material; nevertheless, the changes which the modern industrial system
has brought about have in no wise weakened the mystic force of Russian
literature. Sologub is a mystic, a mystic of Russian tradition; and
Sologub is a product of Petrograd_.
_JOHN COURNOS_